David Eagleman in Edge:

At some point, the Mongol military leader Kublai Khan (1215–94) realized that his empire had grown so vast that he would never be able to see what it contained. To remedy this, he commissioned emissaries to travel to the empire's distant reaches and convey back news of what he owned. Since his messengers returned with information from different distances and traveled at different rates (depending on weather, conflicts, and their fitness), the messages arrived at different times. Although no historians have addressed this issue, I imagine that the Great Khan was constantly forced to solve the same problem a human brain has to solve: what events in the empire occurred in which order?

Your brain, after all, is encased in darkness and silence in the vault of the skull. Its only contact with the outside world is via the electrical signals exiting and entering along the super-highways of nerve bundles. Because different types of sensory information (hearing, seeing, touch, and so on) are processed at different speeds by different neural architectures, your brain faces an enormous challenge: what is the best story that can be constructed about the outside world?

The days of thinking of time as a river—evenly flowing, always advancing—are over. Time perception, just like vision, is a construction of the brain and is shockingly easy to manipulate experimentally. We all know about optical illusions, in which things appear different from how they really are; less well known is the world of temporal illusions. When you begin to look for temporal illusions, they appear everywhere. In the movie theater, you perceive a series of static images as a smoothly flowing scene. Or perhaps you've noticed when glancing at a clock that the second hand sometimes appears to take longer than normal to move to its next position—as though the clock were momentarily frozen.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

Astronomers at Caltech say the Earth will last 1 billion years longer than previous estimates, which makes me wish I'd chosen the bedroom wallpaper more carefully. But Ron Currie's strange new novel raises the opposite prospect: “Everything Matters!” begins with an announcement that a comet will destroy our planet on June 15, 2010. That fast-approaching deadline raises “a question which men and women, great and not-so, of every color, creed, and sexual persuasion have asked since they first had the language to do so, and probably before: Does Anything I Do Matter?”

In a sense, every novel is a search for what matters, so posing the problem here in Caps and italics is not the subtlest move a writer can make. But there's something refreshingly youthful about Currie's eagerness to call out big existential questions that most of us have grown too embarrassed or cynical to ask since we scraped through Intro to Philosophy and moved on to matters of getting and spending. He's writing for the “Slaughterhouse-Five” kids (you know who you are), people who respond to that quirky mix of dark humor, moral imperative and science fiction. Like Vonnegut, Currie is an atheist — his first novel, just out in paperback, is titled “God Is Dead” — and that absence of faith seems to have left him with an intense curiosity about how we live in a world without divine oversight or intervention.

More here.

Zenobia Jacobs and Richard G. Roberts in American Scientist:

Even by archaeological standards, Blombos Cave is a modestly sized shelter. Yet artifacts recovered from just 13 cubic meters of deposit inside transformed our understanding of when our species developed behavioral attributes we associate with “modern” humans. From this cramped hole in a sandstone cliff on the Southern Cape coast of South Africa, Christopher Henshilwood and his colleagues unearthed evidence of symbolic expression, in the form of abstract designs (carved ochre bars) and personal ornaments (shell beads) at least 70,000 years old. That is more than 35,000 years before anything comparable emerged in Europe.

When these discoveries were first announced earlier this decade, they stood out as extraordinary and provocative—at odds with the prevailing wisdom about the time and place of emergence of symbolic behavior, a trait unique to Homo sapiens . Our modern anatomical features can be traced back almost 200,000 years, based on fossilized remains found in Ethiopia, but the making of the modern mind apparently lagged behind by more than 100,000 years. The remarkable finds at Blombos raised several intriguing questions. What triggered this watershed event in human prehistory? How geographically widespread was it? Did it occur simultaneously elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa? And what role, if any, did such innovations play in the first steps of the worldwide dispersal of our species?

More here.

From Antemedius:

If we want to know what torture is, and what it does to human beings, we have to look at it squarely, without flinching. That's just what a powerful and important film, seen by far too few Americans, does. “Torturing Democracy” was written and produced by one of America's outstanding documentary reporters, Sherry Jones. (Excerpts from the film are being shown on the current edition of Bill Moyers Journal on PBS – check local listings, or go to the program's web site at www.pbs.org/moyers, where you can be linked to the entire 90-minute documentary.)

Sherry Jones, a longtime colleague, and the film were honored this week with the prestigious RFK Journalism Award from the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights. “Torturing Democracy” was cited for its “meticulous reporting,” and described as “the definitive broadcast account of a deeply troubling chapter in recent American history.”

Unfortunately, as events demonstrate, the story is not yet history; the early chapters aren't even closed. Torture still is being defended as a matter of national security, although by law it is a war crime, with those who authorized and executed it liable for prosecution as war criminals. The war on terror sparked impatience with the rule of law – and fostered the belief within our government that the commander-in-chief had the right to ignore it.

More here. [Thanks to Wolf Böwig.]

Michael Shermer lays out ten questions we should ask when encountering a claim. From the Richard Dawkins Foundation:

Gary Wills in The Atlantic:

Hour by hour, day by day, Bill Buckley was just an exciting person to be around, especially when he was exhilarated by his love of sailing. He could turn any event into an adventure, a joke, a showdown. He loved risk. I saw him time after time rush his boat toward a harbor, sails flying, only to swerve and drop sail at the last moment. For some on the pier, looking up to see this large yacht bearing down on them, it was a heart-stopping moment. To add to the excitement, Bill was often standing on the helmsman’s seat, his hands clutching the shrouds above his head, turning the wheel with his foot, in a swashbuckling pose. (He claimed he saw the berth better from up there.)

I once saw the importance of his swift reflexes on the boat. We had set out for a night sail on the ocean, and Bill’s Yale friend Van Galbraith—later President Reagan’s ambassador to France—had got tipsy from repeated shots of Tia Maria in his coffee. He fell overboard while the boat was under full sail. In a flash, Bill threw overboard a life preserver with a bright light on it, and called for us to bring the boat about. We circled back toward Galbraith, found him in the darkness, and fished him out. It was a scary moment, one that only Bill’s cool rapidity kept from being a tragic one.

Bill wrote the way he sailed, taking chances.

More here.

Feast your eyes and ears (watch to the end!) on one of the most important and transformative forces in world music in the last half of the 20th century [for Husain Murtaza Naqvi]:

The sun rises
Forough Farrokhzad

Take heed
My wounded eyes melt
Drop by drop
My rebellion my shadow
Surrenders to the light
Take heed

Everything that I am crumbles
My love’s fire surrenders
Carries me to the end
Crucifies me
Take heed
Stars hail in the night

You came from a far
From fields of scent, of light
To carry me, floating
Through clouds of ivory and crystal
Take me away my solace, my hope
Take me to a city of sonnets and passion

Towards the path of milky way draw me
Higher than every star lift me
Take heed
I’ve been set aflame by this light
Fevered, burnt by this light
Like a goldfish in a pool of night
I gnaw helplessly at the stars

Read more »

Ben Zimmer at Visual Thesaurus:

Some have theorized that Ms. has roots long before the 20th century. One piece of evidence that has been put forth is the tombstone of Sarah Spooner, who died in 1767 in Plymouth, Massachusetts. As you can see from this image, what appears on the headstone is M with a superscript s. As Dennis Baron writes in his excellent book Grammar and Gender (1987), “it is certainly an abbreviation of Miss or Mistress, and not an example of colonial language reform or a slip of the chisel, as some have suggested.”

There things stood until 2004, when I happened upon this tantalizing little notice in the Humeston (Iowa) New Era of Dec. 4, 1901 (thanks to the Newspaperarchive database):

The writer seems confused about the Springfield Republican proposal since he (or she, but probably he) guesses that Ms. is an abbreviation of some longer word. That's a confusion that persists among those who assume Ms. is an abbreviated form of Miss or Missus, but the Republican article puts forth Ms. without any particular expansion.

More here.

Roger Cohen in the New York Times:

I said the Islamic Republic has been weakened. Why? I see five principal factors. The first is that the supreme leader’s post — the apex of the structure conceived by the revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini — has been undermined. The keystone of the arch is now loose.

Khamenei, far from an arbiter with a Prophet-like authority, has looked more like a ruthless infighter. His word has been defied. At night, from rooftops, I’ve even heard people call for his death. The unthinkable has occurred.

The second is that the hypocritical but effective contract that bound society has been broken. The regime never had active support from more than 20 percent of the population. But acquiescence was secured by using only highly targeted repression (leaving the majority free to go about its business), and by giving people a vote for the president every four years.

That’s over. Repression will be broad and ferocious in the coming months. The acquiescent have already become the angry. You can’t turn Iran into Burma: The resistance of a society this varied and savvy will be fierce.

More here.

From The Guardian:

A speaker. A speech. A microphone. A bare stage. And – no expense spared here – a glass of water. As an evening's entertainment, it does not sound like much: Bruce Springsteen and his E Street extravaganza this is not. And yet when Malcolm Gladwell, a Manhattan-based journalist, turned up last winter to do a monologue at the Lyceum, a West End theatre that has hosted Led Zeppelin and is now home to the Lion King musical, he filled it – twice. Despite bitter November temperatures, long queues formed and the first show had to be delayed by half an hour to squeeze in as many punters as possible. All 4,000 tickets, at up to £25 a head, sold out.

What were they getting for their money? Gladwell does not do stand-up, is not in exclusive possession of the Lord's wisdom and cannot tell you how to make millions from buy-to-let. A small, skinny, former business reporter with a towering afro and hands that flutter about as if evading an invisible butterfly net, Gladwell likes to address such pressing issues as the quest for the perfect pasta sauce (Google the video: it is brilliant).

(Picture: Canadian social commentator Naomi Klein, one of the big draws of the lecture circuit.)

More here.

Michael Shermer in Scientific American:

In a 1997 episode of The Simpsons entitled “The Springfield Files”—a parody of X-Files in which Homer has an alien encounter in the woods (after imbibing 10 bottles of Red Tick Beer)—Leonard Nimoy voices the intro as he once did for his post-Spock run on the television mystery series In Search of…: “The following tale of alien encounters is true. And by true, I mean false. It’s all lies. But they’re entertaining lies, and in the end isn’t that the real truth? The answer is no.”

No cubed. The postmodernist belief in the relativism of truth, coupled to the clicker culture of mass media where attention spans are measured in New York minutes, leaves us with a bewildering array of truth claims packaged in infotainment units. It must be true—I saw it on television, at the movies, on the Internet. The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, That’s Incredible, The Sixth Sense, Poltergeist, Loose Change, Zeitgeist the Movie. Mysteries, magic, myths and monsters. The occult and the supernatural. Conspiracies and cabals. The face on Mars and aliens on Earth. Bigfoot and Loch Ness. ESP and PSI. UFOs and ETIs. JFK, RFK and MLK—alphabet conspiracies. Altered states and hypnotic regression. Remote viewing and astroprojection. Ouija boards and Tarot cards. Astrology and palm reading. Acupuncture and chiropractic. Repressed memories and false memories. Talking to the dead and listening to your inner child. Such claims are an obfuscating amalgam of theory and conjecture, reality and fantasy, nonfiction and science fiction. Cue dramatic music. Darken the backdrop. Cast a shaft of light across the host’s face. The truth is out there. I want to believe.

More here.

Owen Edwards in Smithsonian Magazine:

The Udvar-Hazy Blackbird, identified by its tail number, 61-7972, holds several records, including: New York to London in 1 hour 54 minutes 56.4 seconds. (Another Blackbird, 61-7958, set the record for average jet speed: 2,193.167 mph.) On March 6, 1990, as it made its final flight, the Smithsonian plane set another record—Los Angeles to Dulles International Airport, outside Washington, D.C., in 1 hour 4 minutes 20 seconds (barely time for a snack and a snooze). That day, a team including Air Force Lt. Col. Ed Yeilding and Lt. Col. Joseph Vida touched the plane down at Dulles for delivery to Udvar-Hazy, the National Air and Space Museum's companion facility.

I asked Shul, a former Air Force fighter pilot and Vietnam veteran who has written two books about the Blackbird—one recounting his reconnaissance for a dramatic raid on Libya in 1986—what it was like to fly such a phenomenal craft. “It wasn't like any other airplane,” he told me. “It was terrifying, exciting, intense and humbling every time you flew. Each mission was designed to fly at a certain speed; you always knew the airplane had more. It was like driving to work in a double-A fuel dragster.”

More here.

Timothy Snyder in the New York Review of Books:

Though Europe thrives, its writers and politicians are preoccupied with death. The mass killings of European civilians during the 1930s and 1940s are the reference of today's confused discussions of memory, and the touchstone of whatever common ethics Europeans may share. The bureaucracies of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union turned individual lives into mass death, particular humans into quotas of those to be killed. The Soviets hid their mass shootings in dark woods and falsified the records of regions in which they had starved people to death; the Germans had slave laborers dig up the bodies of their Jewish victims and burn them on giant grates. Historians must, as best we can, cast light into these shadows and account for these people. This we have not done. Auschwitz, generally taken to be an adequate or even a final symbol of the evil of mass killing, is in fact only the beginning of knowledge, a hint of the true reckoning with the past still to come.

More here.

Daniel Cressey in Nature:

It is widely acknowledged that humans are very bad at making up random numbers. If we weren’t we wouldn’t have invested so much time in developing random number generators.

Now some work by political scientists Bernd Berber and Alexandra Scacco, of Columbia University, suggests that fact hasn’t reached certain key individuals in Iran. As the country struggles with the violent aftermath of its recent hotly contested election, Berber and Scacco say the results of that election seem highly suspicious.

They used the results published by the Ministry of the Interior and examined the last two digits of the votes reported for the four main candidates.

“The numbers look suspicious,” they report in the Washington Post.

There are far too many 7s, for a start, and not enough 5s. Such results would occur in fewer than four in 100 non-manipulated election results, they write.

That would not rule out Iran’s election being fair. But Scacco and Berber go further. They note that previous work has proven that humans have trouble generating “non-adjacent digits”, ie: 27 as opposed to 23, or 36 rather than 34. Non-manipulated results should be approximately 70% non-adjacent digits; Iran’s results are 62% non-adjacent.

The probability of that happening in a fair election is less than 4.2%, they write.

More here. In the Washington Post article, Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco conclude:

Each of these two tests provides strong evidence that the numbers released by Iran's Ministry of the Interior were manipulated. But taken together, they leave very little room for reasonable doubt. The probability that a fair election would produce both too few non-adjacent digits and the suspicious deviations in last-digit frequencies described earlier is less than .005. In other words, a bet that the numbers are clean is a one in two-hundred long shot. [My emphasis.]

Also see: Chatham House Study Definitively Shows Massive Ballot Fraud in Iran's Reported Results

“Treat Africa as if it were one country,” quips the Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina in “How to Write About Africa,” a barbed guide for Western authors who hope to address this misunderstood continent. “Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. . . . Keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.” First published in Granta in 2005, Wainaina’s satire lands its punch by gathering the tenacious clichés about Africa—the savage and noble-savage exotica still lodged in the Western imagination, the game-hunting landscapes that seem to autogenerate purple raptures, the liberal visitor’s hand-wringing about endemic graft and corruption. Wainaina trots out a parade of straw figures such as the Loyal Servant, the Ancient Wise Man, the venal Modern African, and the Starving African, “who wanders the refugee camp nearly naked, and waits for the benevolence of the West. . . . She can have no past, no history; such diversions ruin the dramatic moment.” Wainaina’s essay is more than an acerbic takedown of lazy and half-informed Western perceptions. Embedded within it is a manifesto of sorts. If we turn inside out the sardonic rules and prohibitions, a vision of African literature emerges that departs from the dark-continent fantasies still entertained even by sophisticates in Europe and North America. “Taboo subjects: ordinary domestic scenes, love between Africans (unless a death is involved), references to African writers or intellectuals, mention of school-going children who are not suffering from yaws or Ebola fever or female genital mutilation. . . . Avoid having the African characters laugh, or struggle to educate their kids, or just make do in mundane circumstances.” In one sense, this is a call to normalize African writing, to make its human scale comparable to that of literature set elsewhere.

more from James Gibbons at Bookforum here.

In 2005, Venus Williams and Maria Sharapova met in the Wimbledon semifinals, where they played a tough two-set match that Williams won. It was hard-fought and entertaining, and had another distinction as well – it was unprecedentedly loud. By the end of the second set, both women were hitting groundstrokes with tremendous pace, impossible accuracy, and amazing noise. If you turned your back to the television, you might have imagined that NBC was broadcasting not a match on the All-England Club’s hallowed Centre Court, but a particularly long street fight. The rise of grunting in tennis has become one of the most curious sideshows in the sports world. Baseball has steroids. Football has head trauma and Terrell Owens. Tennis has this. The controversy over grunting is reaching maximum interest this week because of Michelle Larcher de Brito, the 16-year-old from Portugal who made a lot of noise at last month’s French Open with both her tennis and her grunt. There has never been one quite like it – a violent squeal released with every stroke, which, at peak intensity, sounds like she’s in pain, ecstasy, or trouble. The complaints about her in France have put pressure on officials in England, where Wimbledon begins tomorrow. The tournament is considering a crackdown: officially, the offense would be called a “noise hindrance,” and if an umpire declares a grunt too loud, the offender could be charged a point.

more from Wesley Morris at the Boston Globe here.

A sexy, dolled-up blonde enters a fancy hotel suite with an oaf of a man. Her face is impassive and haughty, her posture erect. This dame is not easily impressed. She stands around as the hotel’s manager attempts to please the oaf, showing him around, but she hardly pays attention. The manager politely leads her to her room, which faces the one the big oaf is in. The oaf, seeing her across the courtyard, opens a window, and shouts, “Hey, Billie!” Taking her time, the blonde demurely saunters over and in her Tenement-best wails, “Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat??!!” Such are Judy Holliday’s surprising first moments in the 1950 film Born Yesterday. Three-and-a-half minutes in, that “Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat??!!” marks the film’s real start like a steam trumpet. From then on, you’re hooked. Holliday steals every scene she’s in. As Billie Dawn, the ditzy former chorus girl turned fiancé of a well-to-do mobster, she is hilarious and mesmerizing, mainly because you’re never sure just what she’ll do next. She moves in a practiced shimmy, knowing she’s putting on a show but never making a big show about the fact that she’s putting on a show. The voice of Billie Dawn — which Holliday spent four years perfecting on Broadway before starring in the movie version — is the high-pitched, Damon Runyon-esque “Toity-toid and Toid” that audiences have come to expect of their dumb broads, but she slurs her lines a little and never leaves the moment. She’s a Marlon Brando of dingy dames. It’s an iconic performance, one that would win her the Academy Award for Best Leading Actress at the age of 29 and come to define her career.

more from Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set here.

Kore
Robert Creeley

As I was walking
I came upon
chance walking
the same road upon.

As I sat down
by chance to move
later
if and as I might,

light the wood was,
light and green,
and what I saw
before I had not seen.

It was a lady
accompanied
by goat men
leading her.

Her hair held earth.
Her eyes were dark.
A double flute
made her move.

‘O love,
where are you
leading
me now?’

Kore: Persephone